I purchased some Chinese fans and chinese new year themed napkins from a party store to make the table more festive. The girls had Ginger Lime chicken bites and white rice with soy sauce for dinner. (If you leave off the green onions, kids generally like it. Its a family favorite at my house and easy to prepare).
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| Festive dinner girls |
The girls liked the book. We had all thumbs up. The book deals with themes about race and culture that was eye opening for the girls. In one scene, Pacy decides she cannot try out for the role of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz because she is Taiwanese American. There is also a camp she attends with other Taiwanese Americans where some girls make fun of her and call her the name "twinkie" (yellow on the outside but white on the inside) because she does not speak Taiwanese. One of the girls has a close family friend who is Taiwanese American, so the book was exciting for her to read and learn about her friend's family customs. Every new year, she gets a red envelope from her friend with money for luck. The book does a great job of sharing different Taiwanese traditions, and also how the family in the book blends both cultures.
Some discussion questions for the book we used were from this study guide at Grace Lin's website.
For the activity, we used two activities from Grace Lin's website. I used the snipping tool on the computer to pull the images off the website and imbed in a Word Document so we could print them out as a worksheet.
The first was a drawing sheet how to draw the dog. We printed this out and gave to the girls as a fun worksheet.
Dog worksheet
The second was instructions for how to paint the FU (for luck). Here are the instructions:
Grace Lin Chinese New Year banner craft instructions
We gave the girls red paper plates and yellow paint to paint the FU on. I printed this worksheet with the image of how to draw the FU for each to use as reference.
How to draw FU worksheet
As always, at the end of the meeting, I gave the girls their bottle cap buttons for their lanyards.
Here are the bottlecap images for The Year of the Dog.
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| Lanyard is filling up ;) |
